Tuesday, October 02, 2012

This is the seventh in a series of posts on this week’s OSCE “Human Dimension Implementation” meeting in Warsaw. More will be coming later this week. See the list of links at the bottom of this post for previous articles.

One of the most effective strategies employed by the Muslim Brotherhood over the last decade or so of this information war has been to insert the word “Islamophobia” into our public discourse as a catch-all term of opprobrium for anything said by infidels that Muslims dislike or fear. They have succeeded to the point where almost any public figure in the West is willing to twist himself into a halal pretzel to avoid being designated an “Islamophobe”, by Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Participants in OSCE Human Dimension meetings refer to “Islamophobia” in their official submissions, yet the term remains completely undefined. One of the primary tasks of ICLA at this month’s meeting in Warsaw has been to force the OSCE to define its terms — or to stop using them in official publications.

In the name of the International Civil liberties Alliance, I would like to express a deep concern over the repetitive use of imprecise, confusing and ambiguous concepts and words in OSCE forums and working materials. For several years some State members, NGOs and experts have repeatedly used the word “Islamophobia” and the concept of “religious hatred” even though these expressions have no precise meaning nor internationally accepted definition.

The repetitive use of meaningless or ambiguous concepts, especially if they are used as tools in negotiations in the field of Human Rights and eventually lead to their curtailing, has proven to be very unproductive and in some cases clearly damaging for individual freedoms in several state member countries.

The word “Islamophobia” has been intensively used by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and its satellite organizations in the voluntary simultaneous dual meaning of hate and prejudice against Islam as a religion or doctrine and against Muslims as a group or as individuals.

“Religious hatred” has also been intensively used by OIC and satellite organizations to ambiguously describe an antagonistic feeling against a religion or doctrine and or against religious groups and often without any reliable way to know which meaning is used.

Expressions with dual meanings cannot be used as tools in rational thinking or discourse and therefore can have no place in an international assembly such as OSCE, where serious issues are discussed.

Recommendations to ODIHR:

To allow sincere and constructive dialogue and cooperation between state members, NGOs and exterior participants, ICLA ask ODIHR to systematically provide a precise definition of both the expressions “Islamophobia” and “religious hatred” each time they are used in a document and, in absence of precise definitions, to adopt a by-default non-receivability rule for all document containing one or both of those expressions.